First-order effects

• Technorati remains standalone despite actively shopping itself for a merger or acquisition partner; b5media walks away from what was reportedly days from closing, leaving both parties' consolidation plans reset.
• The failed deal lands on top of recent self-inflicted wounds — Technorati had just dropped all blog content older than six months from its index, degrading the core product any acquirer would be valuing.

Second-order effects

• Competitive pressure keeps mounting while Technorati stalls: Techmeme's leaderboard launch directly attacked Technorati's last stronghold, giving advertisers and publishers an alternative authority metric and shrinking the asset's negotiating value.
• Other struggling Web 2.0-era properties watching this deal die get a data point that mid-tier blog-industry assets are hard to pair off cleanly, likely pushing them toward fire-sale pricing or pivot-over-sale strategies instead.

Third-order effects

• The pattern points toward a structural winnowing of first-generation blog search and ranking services: without a defensible business model, they either reinvent themselves (as Technorati later attempted when it changed its business and few noticed) or fade into distressed exits — Technorati ultimately sold to Synacor for $3M after raising $32M, a near-total loss of invested capital.
• If consolidation of blog networks and discovery tools continues failing at fair prices, expect the attention-authority layer of the blogosphere to migrate to platform-native metrics and memetrackers rather than independent intermediaries.